Andreas Antonopoulos Explains Bitcoin to the Canadian Senate

Andreas M. Antonopoulos promoted Bitcoin at the 11th meeting of the Canadian Senate Committee on Banking, Trade and Commerce, on October 8th, 2014, dedicated to the Committee’s study on the use of digital currency.

In Canada, the public debate surrounding Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies is currently being formalized as the official “Study on the use of digital currency”, a consultative exercise conducted at the initiative of the Senate of Canada’s Banking, Trade and Commerce committee.

Although the Senate of Canada exerts less authority than the House of Commons, its standing committees have proven to be an influential source of expertise and opinion. It also enjoys considerable international attention: according to Stuart Hoegner, general counsel at the Bitcoin Alliance, “no other parliamentary body in the world has publicly canvassed the breadth of materials and opinion that this committee has”.

“Andreas is absolutely, mind-blowingly amazing at relaying the thoughts and ideals of this community, as well as taking into account that he needs to be spot-on with the norms and ideas of the listeners (in this case the Canadian Senate).”

Andreas M. Antonopoulos is a passionate technologist and a serial tech-entrepreneur. As a Bitcoin entrepreneur, he founded three Bitcoin businesses, launched several community open-source projects, and wrote a bitcoin book for developers, “Mastering Bitcoin,” published by O’Reilly Media.

In the book’s introduction, Antonopoulos outlines the important features of Bitcoin, explained in the talk:

“[Bitcoin] represents a breakthrough in distributed computing science and has wide applicability beyond currency. It can be used to achieve consensus on decentralized networks for provably-fair elections, lotteries, asset registries, digital notarization and more.”

“The invention itself is groundbreaking and has already spawned new science in the fields of distributed computing, economics and econometrics.”

“To be robust against intervention by antagonists, be they legitimate governments or criminal elements, a digital currency needed to avoid the use of a central currency issuing or transaction clearing authority that could be a single point of attack. Bitcoin is such a system, completely de-centralized by design, lacking any central authority or point of control that can be attacked or corrupted.”

[divider]CCN[/divider]Images from Mykhaylo Palinchak and Shutterstock.